


Cease Upon the Midnight

by lonelywalker



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Demonic Possession, F/M, Not actually sure if the demon is Dracula at this point, Or Amun-Ra, Or [enter your guesses here], Post-1.05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 12:53:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1779796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The serpent came to her every night in Sir Malcolm’s form. It took days, weeks, for her to realise he came to her in his body as well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cease Upon the Midnight

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale".

The serpent came to her every night in Sir Malcolm’s form. It took days, weeks, for her to realise he came to her in his body as well. True flesh against her flesh, a man who could be seen by mirrors, and yet had only mirrors behind his eyes. Sembene must have known, seen or heard Malcolm slip into her room, and he must have wondered. But then, serpent or not, Malcolm was a killer, an animal fucker of ladies and whores. Perhaps Sembene had never wondered at all.

His company was comfort, in a way. No need for a haughty disguise with Victor and Ethan, no need to play enigmatic games with Mr. Gray. Whereas the real Malcolm would always regard her with silent disdain for the silly, seductive girl she had been, the serpent knew her and knew her truly. Their love affair had begun long, long ago.

“You were not always mine,” the serpent said in Malcolm’s voice, a voice made for barking orders and for murmuring secrets in tones that literature always termed _lilting_. “But could it ever have been different? You and I… Two families spoke of fate, you were destined to be a Murray, to have Murray children and no identity of your own, to sit reading of adventure by the fire while you grew old and fat and satisfied…”

“I am not yours now.” She could still say it and at least half believe it, make it sound as though she believed it, lying in a nightgown she knew would vanish in a second when she took him in. The game was never that she didn’t want him. The game was that she could tell him no and close the door.

The serpent smiled in that gentle yet patronising way she recognised from Malcolm himself. “Child… Plaything… Mother…”

He tasted of scotch and tobacco when he kissed her, when she tore the nightgown from her own body. What did Malcolm remember when he woke? A dreamless sleep? Mere fantasies of walking along the hallway and ravishing his daughter’s childhood friend? Was he consumed by guilt and desire while they breakfasted and pored over tomes and consulted with their associates? There was no denying that she had been idly attracted to him years ago, this dashing explorer who had fucked her mother. They were both older now, and wounded, but there was a reason the serpent had come to her not as Peter but as his father. The father who could have been her father. Who had she really hoped to find downstairs on the eve of Mina’s wedding?

“Get inside me,” she said, and her childhood religion added _Satan_. 

This was power and strength even when he was on top of her, fucking her with Malcolm’s cock such that she grabbed at him, arched up into him, begging for more with his hand on her throat.

It had been this way the first time, when he had been nothing but ethereal, only in her head, drawing on her only past experience of sex. Then, too, she’d been used but consenting, laid out among dead animals while experiencing life for the first time. Had that primal drive been an excuse then? Was it an excuse now? She could bed Ethan or Dorian, or likely even the real Malcolm given the right circumstances. But this was the only way she could truly be naked, looking into the black eyes of the serpent as she climaxed, with no one to hear or interrupt other than the faithful Sembene, who had already ignored much worse.

“You will listen,” the serpent said in a rough, dark whisper, his mouth by her ear. “Listen to the darkness, hear it speak.”

“Tell me.”

“I _am_ telling you, Vanessa mine. I have been telling you all your life.”

His movements were hard, forceful, fucking her beyond fucking, beyond the stamina of the body itself. No one could speak so charmingly when even she was breathless, lightheaded, barely able to gasp a word.

There was finally one last jerk, though, and hot seed spilled wetly into her.

“Enter the maze,” the serpent said, his weight soft and warm and suffocating. “Round the corner. Go beyond the world of niceties and see what you have always seen.”

She fixed her gaze on his, on the inhuman blackness instead of Malcolm’s face. “I see you, serpent.”

There was no forked tongue when he kissed her. “Find me, then. Be with me.”

He left her sprawled naked among sheets torn away from the mattress, all feverish sweat. She slept as little as Malcolm truly did these days, as little as Victor from the look of him. The monsters in her mind held no real fear – the serpent _loved_ her, in his way – but they kept her from solace.

Often she sat up writing the letters, or prayed, although the letters were also a kind of prayer. What would Mina think of her now? Would she even be surprised by the thought of Vanessa and her demon lover?

The seed the serpent left inside her was real and human, but she had not bled since her illness and worried little about that kind of disgrace. Still, she imagined it thriving within her, a darkness that had been conceived when she was just a little girl, and only now was flourishing and growing. She had no swollen belly to tell of her sins. She could walk through London and be thought a lady, even if her unmarried stratus and her current residence with a widower were mildly scandalous in themselves.

She should run. The serpent would find her, would always be with her, but she should run. Instead she looked him in the face and knew what he was, and made sure he knew she was coming for him with a crucifix and a sword. If she could not be his equal, she would not be his slave.

The threads of it all had been woven so very long ago, when a gate was opened and children fell into a childish love with each other before adulthood threatened to crush them.

Peter had been weak, and Peter had died. Mina was sweet, and Mina was lost. But Vanessa… 

Vanessa was strong, and Vanessa would win.


End file.
